Opening TPC ports

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this post, but I'd be grateful if somebody could please help me. I'm trying to open ports 999, 1982 and 1983 but am not having much luck. I used
iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --sport 999 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --sport 1982 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --sport 1983 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
to open the ports but haven't been successful. I was told to make sure that your server TCP ports: 999, 1982, 1983 are fully open inbound and outbound and that destination IP address for those ports is 72.232.181.106.
I've been trying for ages to get these ports open, but haven't had any luck.
This is the first time I've ever used a dedicated server and I am very new to all of this so I in advance for lack of knowledge

Thanks

If it helps after I tried to open the ports I ran iptables -L and this is the result:

# Unload modules on restart and stop
# Value: yes|no, default: yes
# This option has to be 'yes' to get to a sane state for a firewall
# restart or stop. Only set to 'no' if there are problems unloading netfilter
# modules.
IPTABLES_MODULES_UNLOAD="yes"

# Save (and restore) rule and chain counter.
# Value: yes|no, default: no
# Save counters for rules and chains to /etc/sysconfig/iptables if
# 'service iptables save' is called or on stop or restart if SAVE_ON_STOP or
# SAVE_ON_RESTART is enabled.
IPTABLES_SAVE_COUNTER="no"

An engineer for host said they'd look into it this morning so it could be that the ports are now open, but they definately weren't open before because I had video that wouldn't play because the ports weren't open